Of Relevance

Renting offices is expensive, and often problematic. You have to tie yourself in to a lease, pay a deposit and ensure that your business is viable enough at all times to support it: there is very little flexibility. Which is why, I guess, the concept of sharing office space has taken off hugely in the US. There is a whole culture around it, and there are many permutations of the same offering.

The gist of it is that instead of tying yourself to a long lease, you simply rent a space for a desk in a big office, and share it with others who are there under the same arrangement. The advantages are obvious:

• You pay only for the space you use
• You share the office with other cool people
• You are not tied to a lease
• You can add space as you can afford it (if your team grows, for instance)
• You often get the benefits of a receptionist, and business equipment
• You have access to good bandwidth, that you for per usage

You can explore the world of coworking by following the links from this excellent wiki on the subject

Well… Gareth Knight, Brett Haggard and myself would like to arrange a space like that for web workers in Joburg. We still have to finalise details, but the space would probably be in the Rivonia/Sandton area, and would cost about R1000 – R1500 per desk, per month. There wouldn’t be a lease, and I’m sure there would be some sort of crowd law that would ensure that everyone is creating a fun atmosphere, that is conducive to producing good work.

Gareth is going to be running a start up, Brett will run Hypertext Media (custom magazine publishing) and I will play around with some new ventures that I am starting soon.

We are trying to gauge the interest of others who would want to participate, so that we know how big a space we need to find. If you are a freelancer, work from home or runs a small company and want to save on office rent and mix with a cool crowd of people, get in touch with us. You can email me at eved AT ideabank.co.za or leave a comment below. There is no obligation, but please only express interest if this is genuinely something you would want to do. Let us know how many people you would be bringing with you, and if you have a finite time for which you need the space.
We would probably get this going from January or February.

As a web strategist who shies away from implementation, I am very often asked by clients and colleagues to recommend people or companies who can do “xyz”. I love putting people in touch with each other, and have often thought that there should be a handbook of South African who specialise in the various web technologies.

Well, there is now :-) I am putting together a “SA Web Bible”, which will hopefully be a pretty comprehensive listing of all the companies in South Africa who offer web related solutions to clients. The “book” will be a .pdf, so it can be downloaded easily. It will also be free, published under a Creative Commons license that will allow it to be distributed freely and widely.

The corporate listings have a cost of R1,500 to be included, which I think is fair, since the companies are going to get huge exposure from this, and are sure to pick up new clients.

The last .pdf book I published got about 3,000 views, and that had a very limited marketing campaign and a very niche audience. I am pretty confident that this could go into the tens of thousands in not too long a time.

The coolest thing though, is that I am including one-man shows and freelancers for free. So if you are a web expert in any web-related field, please submit your details for free inclusion.

There is loads more information on Who Can Help Me.

(I really do want to include as many individuals as possible. If you know of someone else who could benefit from a listing, please let them know! Or if you represent a company who would like to be listed, please get in touch with me).

One of the coolest, most vibrant and funnest events on the conference calendar is SxSW (South by South West), which happens in Austin in March, every year.

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery. Year after year, the event is a launching pad for new creative content. Conference panel discussions present a forum for learning, business activity thrives at the Trade Shows and global networking opportunities abound. Intellectual and creative intermingling among industry leaders continues to spark new ideas and carve the path for the future of each ever-evolving field, long after the events’ conclusion.

I’ve always wanted to go … but who wants to go to an event like this alone? So I am hoping that I can get about 30 South Africans together, and make a serious trip out of it. With the traction of Geekretreat, Silicon Cape and the general growing mood of online innovation in South Africa this is the time to do go.

We also have another excellent opportunity to showcase our South African talent and support: one of our own, Toby Shapshak @shapshak, has been offcially chosen as one of the SxSW speakers!!! So we can cheer him on as he and his panel talk about “Battery Life: The final (mobile) Frontier“.

I have organised 15 rooms at a hotel around the corner from the Austin Convention Centre, at a relative bargain and am getting a group discount from Delta for a flight from Joburg – Atlanta -Austin, return. The SxSW tickets start at $395, if you buy early enough. All in all, the trip will cost between R23,000 and R25,000, including top flights, top accommodation and conference ticket. I am going to be looking for sponsorship to help us cover some of the cost, but if you decide to participate you should expect to pay the full cost, just to be safe. Better still, get your boss to pay for you to go.

I also certainly want to include some people on the trip on a full sponsorship. If anyone can help with that, please let me know.

If you are thinking of going, or simply want to learn more about the event, please read what some other sites/people have to say about it:

If you want to come join the rest of us on this trip, please sign up here, email me on eved AT ideabank.co.za or just post a comment below and I’ll get in touch with you.

Others who have expressed interest in coming are:
Gareth Knight
Paul Jacobson
Justin Spratt
Andy Hadfield
Mike Stopforth
Heather Ford (Will be joining us from US)
Guy Taylor
Richard Frank
Rob Stokes
Brett Haggard
Ismail Dhorat
Craig Rodney
Colin Daniels
Jack Kruger
Justin Hartman
Matthew Buckland
Jarred Cinman
Rob Gilmour
Elan Lohmann

For a full list see here.

The dates of the trip are March 10 – March 17 2010.

I attended the Internet Solution conference, Internetix, on Tuesday and I just wanted to blog some thoughts around it.

Conferences are a dime a dozen, of course, but I don’t think I have ever attended one in South Africa that I enjoyed as much. Which got me thinking as to why exactly Internetix was such a success, and whether that success can be replicated by smaller companies.

Some factors that contributed to the day:

The venue: held on Dimension Data’s Campus, where IS sits, the conference venue is ideal for a conference of this size. The auditoriums are world class, the technology is (mostly) spot on and the networking spaces are top notch.

The speakers: For starters, the speakers were from various disciplines. Amongst many more, the speakers included Ravi Naidoo talking about S African creativity, Mark Gevisser talking about the future of S Africa under Zuma and Justin Spratt talking about the future of telecommunications under the power of Voip. There was a panel made up of the key telco people in S Africa (representing IS, Icasa, Telkom, and Neotel. Alan Knott Craig was part of the panel in his personal capacity) and Roy Blumenthal talking about the need for personal creativity. Tying it all together was the thread of the “What if” question…an excellent way to allow diverse topics to co-exist, while not boring the audience. All speakers had knowledge, passion and experience in their field, and it showed.

The attendees: This was probably the highlight for me. The conference was extremely well attended (I heard that there were probably more than 1200 people there), but I felt as if I was walking into a friend’s private party. It seemed as if half of the Geekretreaters were there. Obviously my advantage is that I have cool friends who actually attend events like Internetix, but even if I didn’t, the venue and the setup was very condusive to mingling, breaking out and socialising.

No agenda, hidden or otherwise: Ultimately, Internet Solutions put on a show for its clients and other people for the purpose of opening up the audience’s minds, and daring us to ask the “What if” question. No pushing of product. Even if there was an agenda you could immediately tell that it wasn’t to :

• make money
• push IS capabilities

This made for a conference that was neutral and accessible. And interesting. I also got the feeling that a lot of the attendees were there as IS’s guests (I was, thanks to Justin Spratt). But I think that even those who did pay, forked over only about a R1,000 or so. This makes for a nice change from the R5,000 ticket prices that are the norm these days.

South Africa needs more events like these: gatherings for 500+ people, with varied and top notch speakers, thought provoking tracks and affordable prices. I can’t imagine that the big corporates would struggle to make it happen. But I know of other, smaller players who are trying to shake up the conference industry, such as Gareth Knight the organiser of Tech4Africa happening in August 2010, Netprophet and Tedx.
Let’s hope the trend continues.

So once again I am setting off on the “A blog post a day, for 30 days” challenge. I have attempted this before and have failed miserably, but am hoping that this time better time management will help me succeed.

I am going to see if I can identify a blogging format that works better for me than my past formats. I think I place an onus on blog posts to be lengthy and well argued (whether I achieve this is questionable), and therefore I am put off by the time commitment necessary to write a post.

I am going to try something relatively new for me: rather than post on one topic, I am going to try and post many short paragraphs on various topics. My inspiration will come mostly from my news reader, which is as good a place to start as any. I won’t limit myself to this format, but expect to see it more often here.

“TsFTD” stands for Thoughts of the day, by the way.

Here goes.

In Google’s words, the service…

..is designed to develop mobile applications that serve the needs of poor and other vulnerable individuals and communities, most of whom have limited access to information and communications technology.

The power of the Internet extends beyond cool mapping technology, wikipedia at our fingertips and online shopping. We should not forget that it offers the potential to save lives, improve economic conditions, educate and uplift. It’s heartening to see Google spend efforts to connect the poor, and it is another example of how the Seacom cable is already affecting and improving Africa.

Sticking with the Google (which owns Youtube). From tomorrow you will be able to include a link with any video you post, so that your viewers can click on it and be taken to another website (preferably one that has *something* to do with the video itself. This will drive traffic away from Youtube of course, but since it seems Google has a footprint everywhere, they probably really don’t care. My understanding is that the link will be in the format of the layover ad we are used to seeing already..but you’ll have full control over the text.

Super insightful article from Techrunch exploring the potential of Bitly as a competitor to Digg. Digg gets 20,000 unique URL submissions per day. Bitly gets close to 3 million. Now both services are trying to emulate each other, and I will be watching with interest to see this unfold.